News

IntelliJ IDE To Provide Full Java 7 Support

• By John K. Waters
• February 23, 2011

JetBrains, the Prague-based creator of code-centric Java IDE IntelliJ IDEA, this week took the wraps off the upcoming version of its flagship development environment. According to the company, the major focus of IntelliJ 10.5 will be Java 7 support.

"All of the new language features will be fully supported across the product, with code completion, code inspections, quick fixes and so on," the company said on its "Tips & Tricks" blog. "Of course, we're also working on bug fixes, usability and performance improvements. In particular, in this release we've focused on improving startup performance, so you can expect the new version of IntelliJ IDEA to open and load your projects faster."

The IntelliJ IDEA is one of the relatively few such tools to survive the advent of the Eclipse juggernaut that rolled over the Java IDE market a few years ago. In 2009, the company open sourced the IntelliJ Platform, which provides the underlying APIs for all JetBrains IDEs, including IntelliJ IDEA, RubyMine, Web IDE, and MPS. With version 9.0 of the IDE, the company began offering two editions: Community and Ultimate. The Community Edition is free and available under the Apache 2.0 license; the Ultimate Edition is the commercial version.

Among the stand-out features of this IDE is smart type-aware code completion: The environment "knows" when a coder wants to cast to a type and is aware of run-time type checks, which makes it possible to perform cast and method invocation in a single action.

Among other improvements, version 10 of the IDE added a feature that automatically invokes code completion as the coder types. Version 10.5 comes with improvements to the console for Spring Roo, the Java EE RIA dev tool; integration of the Jetty Java-based HTTP server and servlet container; support for version 2 of XSLT ((Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations); new refactorings for the Java-based Groovy programming language; and support for the Google Chrome web browser in the JavaScript debugger.

The company unveiled the IntelliJ IDEA 10.05 during a celebration of new offices in Munich, Germany. (Snapshots and status updates are available on the company's Facebook page.)

The new version is scheduled for a general availability release this Spring, but the Early Access Preview program starts in a few weeks. The company is inviting anyone interested to download the source code for the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition from the JetBrains download page here.